John 15:19 If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.

One of the things you get to learn pretty quickly is how many people have something bad to say about Christians; and then you have to ask why… aren’t we supposed to be the good guys?

The answer is surprisingly easy to understand when you hear it. When we stand up to being the good guys others will start to hate us because we start to make them look worse just because we look good.

God wants us to stand out as being different for a good reason so stand up and be counted!

Luke 18:11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector.

There is only one way to say that you are sorry and that is to tell the truth and accept blame on yourself. If you try to shift the blame onto someone else then you are not saying sorry, you are blaming someone else!

God does not want us to compare ourselves to others or justify ourselves by other people’s standards; God wants us to compare what we do with His rules and see that we have done it wrong – according to His rules and His rules alone.

Look at your own actions, not others actions…

Psalm 123:3 Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us, for we have had more than enough of contempt.

Sometimes we just have to admit it – we have done it wrong and we have to apologise! When we apologise we ask for forgiveness so that we can move on and aim for good works again.

If we don’t stop and say we’re sorry we continue to have our hearts filled with those bad things, evil things, hateful things; and we find it harder to then say we are sorry.

We need to break the cycle and stop and admit we did it wrong. That is the only way we can move forward again with God.